The death of Fred Ordway recalls the sins of post-WWII decades when Americans turned a blind eye to Nazi atrocities as long as German scientists and engineers brought to this country dedicated themselves to the Stars and Stripes. As “rocket scientist” Wernher von Braun’s chief popular apologist, Ordway helped to cosmeticize von Braun’s complicity in using slave laborers from the hellish Dora concentration camp to build V-2 rockets for Hitler, as well as his status as a Nazi Party member since 1937 and wartime major in the SS who wore the black uniform. Instead of spending years in prison as a war criminal, von Braun became an American hero of the Space Age, thanks to U.S. government censorship of records and Ordway’s hagiographic biographies. The late astronomer Tom Gehrels called one such book “Nazi propaganda” in the review pages of Nature. Now we can contemplate the question of which is worse: the moral depravity of von Braun’s contemporaries or the rank ignorance of newspaper obituary writers who repeat the same lies today long after historians finally corrected the story.
